When Did Early Americans Stop Sounding British?
In the 17th century, the population of the American colonies was largely British, and English — while certainly not the only tongue spoken — became the predominant language throughout what is now the eastern U.S.
It raises the question: Did early Americans speak with a British accent? And did the likes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abigail Adams sound like King George III, William Wordsworth, and Jane Austen?
The answer is almost certainly no — but why? Here’s a look at when British and American accents began to diverge, resulting in distinct ways of speaking on either side of the Atlantic.
American English Is Born
Britain has always been, and still is, extraordinarily rich in accents, despite being about the same size as the state of Oregon. You only have to travel a few hours for the accent and often the dialect to change in very notable ways. Back in colonial times, as now, someone from London sounded quite different from a person from Yorkshire, Devon, or Liverpool — and accents were even more distinct among England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
But as soon as settlers from different regions of Britain began landing in the American colonies and started mixing with each other more than they did back in Britain, something known as dialect leveling began to take place. Dialect leveling is a phenomenon that occurs when a variety of different ways of speaking come into contact with one another, and the features that are most common — including accent and pronunciation — tend to overtake others. The outcome is a leveling or smoothing out of differences, eliminating distinct regional or social linguistic elements and creating a more standardized form.
In America, the process was quick. Within a generation, Americans born in settlements such as Jamestown in the early 1600s were already speaking differently than their parents. And it wasn’t only the British mixing with one another. These early colonists came into contact with other European settlers speaking Dutch, Swedish, French, and Spanish, as well as Indigenous languages and, later, the languages of enslaved Africans — all of which contributed to the creation of early American English.
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A Uniform Accent
It wasn’t too long before British visitors to America noticed the difference between their English and that of the colonists. These visitors from the Old World likely expected all kinds of accents to have developed, given the hodgepodge of dialects and languages involved. But instead, they were surprised by how uniform and standard the speech had become across the colonies, regardless of regional or class background.
As one visitor from England noted in 1770, “The colonists are composed of adventurers, not only from every district of Great Britain and Ireland, but from almost every other European government … Is it not therefore reasonable to suppose that the English language must be greatly corrupted by such a strange admixture of various nations? The reverse is however true. The language of the immediate descendants of such promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform, and unadulterated; nor has it borrowed any provincial, or national accent from its British or foreign parentage.”
What made this uniformity so striking was that it hadn’t been planned or imposed — it had emerged organically from the very linguistic chaos that could have prevented it. When settlers from different parts of Britain, Ireland, and continental Europe were thrown together in the same communities, the result wasn’t any one group’s accent transplanted to the New World. It was something new: a blended, democratized form of English.
So, rather than sounding like a muddled linguistic patchwork with a jumble of competing accents, early Americans had forged their own speech within a generation — and decades before independence.
Brits Lose Their “R’s”
The story doesn’t end there. To get a more complete picture of the divergence between British and American accents, we need to look at what was taking place back in Britain at the time.
During the early colonial period and the American Revolution, English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic mostly spoke with a rhotic accent, meaning they pronounced the “r” in words such as “hard” and “farm.” But around the turn of the 19th century, non-rhotic speech, meaning not pronouncing the “r” (for example, “park the car” becomes “pahk the cah”), took off in southern England, particularly among the upper classes as a marker of social status.
This accent, now known as Received Pronunciation, spread across England through the aristocracy, and then through the armed forces and the civil service. But the same trend didn’t take hold in America, at least not among the majority of the population, which remained predominantly rhotic (Boston being a notable exception).
This, along with the ongoing dialect leveling, served to further distinguish the British and American ways of speaking. So, while it can be argued that Americans lost their British accents within a generation of the first colonists, it can also be argued that rather than losing an accent, they formed one all of their own. And both forms of English continued to evolve, giving us two distinct but intimately related ways of speaking.
